No fewer than ten inmates and a police officer were confirmed dead during an attempt to escape from a Haitian prison, police sources have revealed.
“The toll that we have is eleven dead, including a police officer,” police spokesman Gary Desrosiers told AFP of the incident which took place Friday at Croix-des-Bouquets, just outside the Haitian capital.
Three more police officers were seriously injured and will need to be medically evacuated to Cuba, he added.
The incident began at midday Friday, when an unknown number of inmates, who had firearms, tried to break out of the country’s second-largest prison.
The inmates took three police officers and a nurse hostage, according to Desrosiers.
While moving deeper into the high-security establishment, these individuals seized three additional weapons including an assault rifle stored in an office.
Special police reinforcements that were called in the exchanged fire with the inmates.
As a result, four weapons illegally introduced into the prison were recovered as well as the three from the guards’ arsenal.
Africa Daily News, New York recalls that in February 2021, more than 400 inmates escaped from the same prison in broad daylight, an event that resulted in the deaths of 25 people, including the jail’s director.
Meanwhile, no fewer than 62 people were killed when a gas tanker truck exploded in the Haitian city of Cap-Haitien on Tuesday morning, with overwhelmed medics saying the toll was set to rise.
The blast is the latest disaster to hit the poverty-wracked Caribbean nation, riven by gang violence, political paralysis, and acute fuel shortages.
‘We have now counted 62 deaths,’ Deputy Mayor Patrick Almonor confirmed, adding that authorities were still searching for victims amid the charred debris in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city located on the northern coast.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
